Speech Avoids Crucial Questions

August 13, 1987|By JOEL BRINKLEY, The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- Addressing the American people on Wednesday night, President Reagan acknowledged that after nine painful and confusing months of the Iran- Contra affair, ``I know you have doubts in your own minds about what happened.``

But he then carefully skirted the mire of unresolved questions, contradictions and accusations that the congressional investigations left behind. He said little on the controversy that he had not said before and left some of the largest doubts hanging, including questions about the role of William J. Casey, his director of central intelligence. Casey died in May.

Angry that his administration has been picked apart in committee hearings on national television all summer, anguished by polls that say half the public believes he has lied, Reagan set out in the speech to begin putting the Iran- Contra affair behind him.

After vigorous internal debate about how the speech should be shaped, the White House decided that the true end to the administration`s bloodletting would come not from convincing explanations on narrow questions of fact but because the public has grown weary of the whole affair. Some recent polls suggest that is true.

So the president relied on a strategy that has worked for him more than once. As president, he accepted general responsibility for all that was done, saying, ``I am the one who is ultimately accountable to the American people.``

But Reagan blamed himself for no specific misdeeds and said almost nothing specific about the misdeeds of others.

He pointedly declined to say if he would have approved the diversion of profits from the Iran arms sales to the Contras if he had been told about it. In testimony last month his former national security adviser, Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, said he believed the president would have approved it.

``If we start trying to answer this contradiction and that one and then that one, when we get finished there will always be more of them,`` a senior White House official said. ``And for some of them, we`ll never know the real answers.``

With this speech, Reagan tried to soothe, not provoke. He wanted to focus the attention of the public on what he plans for the future, not what he did in the past.

Although some administration officials urged him to attack the congressional committees head on, and the president himself was eager to tell his side of the story -- ``You won`t be able to shut me up,`` he asserted last month -- in the end Reagan and his aides decided the wisest tactic was the one that has worked before.

In December 1983, after 241 American servicemen died in the bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut, Reagan told the nation: ``If there is to be blame, it properly rests here in this office and with this president.``

But he declined to address any of the specific criticisms in a special Pentagon report that said the Marines had been egregiously ill-prepared and some of their commanders had been negligent.

After the Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra affair leveled an array of embarrassing criticisms at the White House in February, Reagan again said, ``I take full responsibility for my own actions and those of my administration`` -- not because of any specific misdeeds but because ``as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.``

Again he stayed away from most of the open questions of fact.

Reagan has not taken direct questions on the matter since the hearings began in May, aside from a hurried phrase thrown back at reporters who shout questions at him as he poses for photos or walks quickly past.

On Monday, in response to a shouted question from reporters -- ``Are you afraid to answer our questions?`` -- Reagan only quipped, ``Afraid of a nice bunch of fellows like you?``

White House officials say they hope the affair will now fade so that when the president next holds a news conference, no sooner than mid-September, ``the national agenda will have changed,`` one official said this week.

The one unknown in this equation is the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, who may be the spoiler in the White House plan.

No one knows when his expected indictments of present or former administration officials may come down. But Walsh made it perfectly clear in a speech to other lawyers last weekend that, to him, public opinion and the national mood do not matter.

In the meantime, if the majority of the public does not believe Reagan has told the complete truth about his own role in the affair, it may be because some of the lingering questions leave no doubt that someone has lied.

Reagan shed little new light on Wednesday night on some of the main questions, including these:

-- He declined to say if he believed that Casey, the director of central intelligence, had betrayed him by conspiring with Lt. Col. Oliver L. North to divert funds to the Contras, as the colonel asserted, or that the intelligence chief had been unaware of the diversion, as Casey said last fall.